The Trump administration on August 21 posted an unsigned article on the White House’s website calling out a number of Smithsonian museums for their exhibitions and messaging, which it sees as out of alignment with its own anti-diversity values. Several artworks were mentioned, among them Hugo Crosthwaite’s 2022 A Portrait of Dr. Anthony Fauci, commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery and depicting the infectious disease expert who led the US Covid-19 response.

By Isa Farfan

The White House’s 26-point bulleted memo includes Amy Sherald’s painting of a transgender woman and an animation of Anthony Fauci. A 2022 series of stop-motion portraits of Anthony Fauci by Outwin winner Hugo Crosthwaite, commissioned by the NPG, also made the list, as did the NMAH’s American Democracy exhibition, which the statement accuses of favoring “leftist” causes like promoting trans athletes competing in the category of their gender identity. 

By Amy Ta

Crosthwaite grew up in Tijuana, studied in the U.S., and has dual citizenship. His family members live on both sides of the border. His work imagines that border as more of a confluence than a division. “You will see aspects of Tijuana materialize in his work, but then you'll also see references to Mickey Mouse and Coca Cola and the border itself; and all of these elements that come together in this place to create what is really a border region and a rather singular culture at that,” Miranda says. 

By Karly Quadros

Inspired by his own close encounter with death, Tijuana and San Diego-based artist Hugo Crosthwaite decided to take on the tradition of ex-votos with a new series of large-scale paintings. The show, Ex-voto, is a series of overlapping snapshots of the city of Tijuana, dense narratives of daily life at the border. Just as in the ex-votos, the physical and spiritual world mingle in scenes of border crossings, street vendors, and women at rest. The Tijuana of Crosthwaite’s paintings is not quite the real one and not quite the sin city of the American imagination. Instead, it is multilayered, a place that we tell stories about and are always returning to across the border fence.

By Carolina A. Miranda

HUGO CROSTHWAITE at LUIS DE JESUS LOS ANGELES (DTLA)
In some ways, the art of Tijuana-born painter Hugo Crosthwaite couldn’t be more germane to the realities of his border city. In his canvases, buildings rise improvisationally on sloping hillsides, and a street vendor chats on her cell phone next to her food stall. But in Crosthwaite’s hands, the mundane is always accompanied by the fantastic. In his large-scale painting “La Línea (The Line),” from 2024 — a phrase used to describe the queue to cross the border, as well as the border itself — you’ll find a row of people standing in line.

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles presents Hugo Crosthwaite: Ex-voto, the artist’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. It brings together a new series of large-scale paintings and multi-panel mural on canvas—a prolific endeavor that continues his commitment to visualizing the many myths, narratives, and dynamics of his native Tijuana, Mexico. The exhibition's title pays homage to Mexican ex-votos, a folk art genre originating from a synthesis of European and Mesoamerican traditions. "Ex-voto," from the Latin ex voto suscepto (meaning "from the vow"), denotes a painting or object expressing gratitude through depictions of answered prayers and miracles.

By Lisa Deaderick

Contemporary artist Hugo Crosthwaite has spent his career disrupting conventions, which includes his latest exhibition at the Mesa College Art Gallery. For two weeks, he’s been engaged in muralism as performance, complete with a costume and opportunities for visitors (or, the audience) to interact with him while he works/performs.

By Cornelia Feye

Hugo Crosthwaite was born in Tijuana and still lives in the house he grew up in behind his father’s curio shop. He is known for his fluid graphite and charcoal figurative black and white drawings that sometimes grow to the size of murals. His portrait drawing of Dr. Anthony Fauci was recently included in the National Portrait Gallery. So, Crosthwaite’s exhibition Tijua Color at Bread & Salt’s main gallery comes as a bit of a shock. Crosthwaite’s life-size paintings are bursting with vibrant colors and hang on normally white walls, now painted in dark red, green, orange, blue and gray.

By Julia Dixon Evans 

Hugo Crosthwaite: 'The Rupture of the White Cube'
Visual art | Prolific artist Hugo Crosthwaite is having a month. With one solo exhibit already on view at Bread and Salt, he's also just installed another at Mesa College Art Gallery. In "The Rupture of the White Cube," curator Smadar Samson worked with Crosthwaite to design a unique and symbolic structure in the middle of the gallery that disrupts the viewer's gaze within the gallery space. The 12 foot cube also serves as a room-within-a-room where Crosthwaite has installed murals. Work on paper and a projected animation will also be on view.

By Julia Dixon Evans 

On a warm August afternoon, Hugo Crosthwaite stepped back from a vivid, steel-blue wall in the sun-streaked Bread and Salt gallery. In one hand, he held a gold paint pen. In the other, the cardboard backing from the pen's packaging, covered with dabs and blobs of gold. Tapping the tip of the pen against the cardboard to get the paint flowing, he reapproached the wall.Bright scenes on canvases rest, awaiting installation against each wall of the main gallery — each wall painted a different, earthy hue. Color is everywhere. Crosthwaite is well-known for his black and white drawings, animations and murals that blend Mexican folklore with cityscapes and vivid portraits of the people that pass him on the streets. But in this new exhibit, he's venturing into color — for the first time.

By Ryan Hardison

This Saturday, as part of the Barrio Art Crawl, peruse the free opening receptions for a pair of new exhibitions at Bread & Salt from 5 to 8 p.m.. Tijuana-born Hugo Crosthwaite’s multi-hued Tijuacolor, on display through October, marks a departure from the artist’s black-and-white charcoal drawings. Visitors can also check out What’s Your Type? at the Athenaeum Art Center within Bread & Salt, an interactive group exhibition exploring regional typography through October 25.  

Espacios & Lines showcases the talents of 16 local artists, with half of them working across borders and five residing in Baja California. Their artwork delve into themes such as shared symbolism, unique perspectives, reimagined boundaries, the necessity of design, and design as a tool for reconstruction, offering viewers a profound exploration of our region's cultural tapestry.

The works of 16 local artists are featured in a new cross-border art exhibition titled "Espacios & Lines" appearing at Terminal 2 at the San Diego International Airport. The exhibition, which explores the border of art and design follows the World Design Oranization's joint designation of San Diego and Tijuana as the World Design Capital 2024. Artists whose work is featured in the exhibition include: Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery's Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition champion winner Hugo Crosthwaite of Baja California.

With 16 local artisans at the helm, half reveling in their binational and five planted firmly in Baja California, prepare for an immersion into diverse perspectives and cultural symbiosos. Among the spotlighted talent, we find Hugo Crosthwaite, the esteemed Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition champion. 

Hugo Crosthwaite is a storyteller at heart. Through his drawings, which range from intimate, black-and-white ink sketches to large-scale, charcoal murals, Crosthwaite closely studies the everyday. Much of his work reflects both on his formative years in Rosarito, Baja California—a city just 10 miles south of the international border—as well as his adult life, which he’s spent straddling the U.S./Mexico border.

A procession of wooden plinths hold aloft groups of idol-sized sculptures, stout bodies with the hallmarks of Mayan figurines, whose torsos sport schematic rib cages, hearts and organs, and are topped with faces rendered in a contemporary style—portraits of migrants and asylum-seekers at the US-Mexico border whom the artist regularly sketches while they wait to make the crossing. This is “Caravan,” a series of sculptures and a short stop-motion animation in which they star—the anchor of a new exhibition by Hugo Crosthwaite in which he continues his decades-long process of documenting the personal experiences and individual stories of the human beings who undertake this perilous journey.

Tijuana-born artist Hugo Crosthwaite’s work combines portraiture, sketching, painting, ceramics, photography and animation to create dense and layered compositions. Working primarily in black and white, Crosthwaite brings characters from allegory and popular media to illustrate the human condition, interacting with the architecture of Tijuana and dreams of the border. His work often elevates the ordinary person to heroic levels showing the trials they endure while surviving in contemporary society. 

At Luis De Jesus, Los Angeles, the artist displays figurines, paintings and animations that draw on the physical, psychological and cultural landscapes of borderlands

Conceptually positioned in the borderlands between the United States and Mexico, ‘Hugo Crosthwaite: Caravan’ at Luis De Jesus deploys the languages of artistic and popular media to portray both the perils of the border and the humanity of those who must traverse it. 

This show, 20 years in the making, follows Hugo Crosthwaite, a Tijuana artist who draws from his experience as a citizen living on the Mexico–U.S. border, sharing what he observed of the landscape and politics. For his new exhibit “Caravan,” at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Crosthwaite spent days with a camera and sketchbook, capturing portraits and stories of the thousands of migrants and refugees trekking the border. The show includes paintings, sculptures and videos that are inspired by the stories he witnessed. This recommendation from The Times’ art and design columnist Carolina Miranda is currently open and runs until March 4.

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles opening reception for Mimi Smith and Hugo Crosthwaite’s solo exhibitions: The opening reception for the new solo exhibitions at the downtown Los Angeles gallery has been rescheduled from last Saturday to this Saturday from 4 to 7 p.m. While the exhibit itself is still available to view, you’ll have to wait a bit longer to celebrate the shows with fellow artists and art lovers. Details can be found on Luis De Jesus Los Angeles’ website.

Hugo Crosthwaite's paintings, sculpture, and stop-motion videos in Caravan speak to the reality faced by migrants as they make the treacherous journey to the border in search of the American Dream.

The three contributors to the smart, nervy “Land of the Free” examined borders, migration and the vexed, static-clouded conversation that takes place between mutually distrustful cultures. Joe Minter brought martial-looking sculptures assembled from scrap iron and used car parts, Hugo Crosthwaite painted murals of his native Tijuana on the MANA walls, and Vincent Valdez haunted visitors with the faces of the Central American disappeared, printed on translucent rice paper, spotlighted and hung like ghostly banners from the ceiling of a narrow chamber that felt very much like a temple. Together, they suggested that barriers impede those who erect them as much as they harm those they restrain.

MANA came roaring back with gorgeous, provocative, emotional show that highlighted everything that the institution does well, and reaffirmed its indispensability to Jersey City arts. “Land of the Free” also felt familiar: Joe Minter’s wonderfully belligerent sculptures made of rusted chains and car parts were continuous with the Hudson County tradition of adaptive re-use in visual art, and Hugo Crosthwaite’s lively drawings of his native Tijuana presented the Mexican border city as a place of danger, exhilaration, and cultural collisions very much like the ones we’ve all grown accustomed to in urban Jersey. 

Dr. Anthony Fauci was the first to accept his Portrait of a Nation Award. As Hugo Crosthwaite’s moving portrait captivated the audience, the room fell silent, heavy with the weight of uncertainty that has shaped the last few years and in reverence for the man who became synonymous with hope as the nation battled a devastating public health crisis in COVID-19.

This year the exhibition added seven more portraits and among them the stop-motion animation portrait of Anthony S Fauci by artist Hugo Crosthwaite. The innovative piece offers an atypical approach to the portrait genre. The artwork compiles a stop-motion animation that suits nineteen drawings from which only seven will be in view at the exhibition.
 

Anthony Fauci said that when he was approached by the National Portrait Gallery of an “unusual person” they suggested to create his portrait, “not only was I not reluctant about it, I got very excited about it.” The Fauci work from artist Hugo Crosthwaite covers the bookends of his career, from his work on HIV/AIDS in the 1980s to the current Covid pandemic.

Mexican artist Hugo Crosthwaite is being honored this weekend in Washington, D.C. as the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery opens the "Portrait of a Nation" exhibition. Crosthwaite's portrait of Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, will be unveiled Thursday alongside portraits of Venus Williams, Serena Williams, Ava DuVernay, Clive Davis, Marian Wright Edelman and José Andrés.

National Portrait Gallery is honoring seven influential minds at their upcoming Portrait of A Nation exhibition. Serena and Venus Williams, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Marian Wright Edelman, Ava DuVernay, José Andrés and Clive Davis were chosen to become immortals on canvas for the showing. Other pieces feature a photograph portrait of Marian Wright Edelman, work by José Andres, Kenturah Davis, and Hugo Crosthwaite that will all show in Portrait of a Nation, showing at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. on November 10 to October 22, 2023. 

A stop-motion drawing animation of Dr. Anthony Fauci by San Diego/Tijuana artist Hugo Crosthwaite has been selected to appear in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. The portrait is one of six honoring “extraordinary individuals who have made transformative contributions to the United States and its people” as part of the 2022 Portrait of a Nation Awards.

Tennis stars Serena and Venus Williams and the filmmaker Ava DuVernay are among the famous faces going on show on November 10 in the “Portrait of a Nation” exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. Hugo Crosthwaite’s multifaceted depiction of Fauci consists of both a series of drawings and a stop motion animation.

The museum’s new works also include a portrait of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical advisor to the President who spearheaded the American response to COVID-19. Hugo Crosthwaite diverged from the other commissioned artists’ more traditional interpretations of portraiture and created a stop-motion animation. Crosthwaite’s work also includes 19 drawings on paper, and seven will be displayed in the National Portrait Gallery’s upcoming exhibition.

Serena and Venus Williams, along with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Marian Wright Edelman, Ava DuVernay, José Andrés and Clive Davis have been chosen as the seven recipients to be honored at the National Portrait Gallery’s (NPG) upcoming “Portrait of a Nation” exhibition. Highlights also include Hugo Crosthwaite’s stop-motion animation of Dr. Fauci, who became the face of the US’ response to the COVID pandemic.

The Portrait Gallery has also commissioned a portrait of the public health expert Fauci by artist Hugo Crosthwaite (b. 1971), first-prize winner of the Portrait Gallery’s 2019 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. The resulting artwork is composed of a stop-motion drawing animation and suite of 19 drawings on paper, seven of which will be on view. 

Anthony Fauci doesn't know how history will remember him, but he does know how it will see him. On a recent Saturday, he's inside a private room at Washington's National Portrait Gallery, looking at the work of art that will hang alongside presidents, celebrities, inventors and other distinguished Americans. It's a video –– a stop motion animation –– chronicling his landmark career through a series of intense drawings that leap out from the screen. 

The new additions—which will be exhibited on the museum’s first floor through October 22, 2023—include a joyous Serena Williams by Toyin Ojih Odutola, the duplicity of Venus Williams visualized by Robert Pruitt, José Andrés feeding the world by Kadir Nelson, a multimedia imagining of Anthony Fauci and his work by Hugo Crosthwaite, an abstraction of Ava DuVernay evoking the moving image by artist Kenturah Davis, and more.

The sensation of the show is Tijuana artist Hugo Crosthwaite, whose “Borderlands” includes a roomful of small, explosive sketches of scenes from an enhanced version of the artist’s hometown, wild, wall-sized acrylic paintings choked with Mexican signifiers and pregnant with foreboding and whispers of violence, and a vibrant wraparound favela sketched all over the surfaces of a large room. 

December is right around the corner and we’re happy to say Miami Art Week is back in grand fashion. This year’s Untitled Art Fair will be in keeping with the festive mood, too. The 10th edition of the event will also be the biggest it’s ever been, with over 145 international galleries exhibiting and a new section, Nest, which will aim to support emerging galleries, collectives, and non-profits. But there’s more. This year, Untitled has also tapped four powerhouse guest curators to create special themed shows within the fair: Natasha Becker, Miguel A. López, Estrellita Brodsky, and José Falconi.

Perhaps no artist of this year’s winners so starkly conveys the binational experience on both sides of the border quite like Hugo Crosthwaite. Blending fantastical elements and intimate portraiture, his drawings seem otherworldly, yet remain grounded in real-life issues. His work has been collected by everyone from the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego to National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago.

The four winners of the annual prize will collectively show off their latest works, which range from street-style pop-surrealism (PANCA) and Turkish-style ceramics (Beliz Iristay), to black-and-white drawings (Hugo Crosthwaite) and subversive paintings (Perry Vásquez). There will be an artist reception on Oct. 9 from 5 to 8 p.m.

For this iteration of the exhibition, which debuted at the National Portrait Gallery in 2019, artists were invited to respond to current social and political contexts. First Prize was awarded to Hugo Crosthwaite for his “A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chávez” (2018), a stop-motion drawing animation that recounts a young woman’s journey from Tijuana, Mexico, to the United States.

As a child, artist Hugo Crosthwaite spent a lot of time hanging out in his father's curio shop in Rosarito, Mexico. It was there that the seeds were planted for his particular approach to art. "That's where I learned English, by just interacting with American tourists," Crosthwaite said. "I would tell them stories about a little ceramic idol and I would make up stories about 'Oh, this is Tlaloc, the god of rain.' It wasn't."

A conversation with a deported Mexican immigrant he met on the streets of Tijuana became a stop-motion animation art piece that won artist Hugo Crosthwaite first prize in “The Outwin: American Portraiture,” a Smithsonian exhibition featured at the Springfield Museums.

Works from the triennial’s fifth edition, including Crosthwaite’s stop-motion drawing animation, “A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chávez,” can still be viewed online at portraitcompetition.si.edu. The Outwin 2019 will also travel to the D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield Museums, Massachusettes (October 3, 2020–April 4, 2021) and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis, Mo. (September 10, 2020–January 23, 2022). 

“The art produced by Mexican and Mexican American artists in the U.S. has a long history that continues to reverberate–this echo is a dynamic and necessary narrative that expands traditional interpretations of American art,” said Amy Galpin, Chief Curator at the museum. Artist Hugo Crosthwaite, whose paintings are featured in the exhibit, was born in Tijuana, Mexico and the cultural aesthetics are influenced with his crossing of the border between Mexico and the United States. The subject matter he paints is inspired by the novel A Dream Called Home by Reyna Grande. 

Greetings from the timeless void of quarantine, where we all feel like astronauts who have been in space just a little too long. I’m Carolina A. Miranda, staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, with your essential guide to all things arts — and operatic krumping. On Instagram, I’ve been very much enjoying Hugo Crosthwaite’s stop motion animations of his quarantine drawings.

Hugo Crosthwaite, the 2019 first place winner was recognized for a stop-motion animated drawing. “A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chávez” (2018) depicts a young woman from Tijuana and explores her pursuit of the American dream. The animated video project is part of a series based on oral histories Crosthwaite has gathered at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Every three years, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery showcases finalists of the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, named for a late benefactor. A total of 46 works are on display from the latest edition, selected last year by a panel of jurors from more than 2,600 submissions, all from American artists who were instructed to respond “to the current political and social context.” Hugo Crosthwaite’s A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chávez, a three-minute video of stop-motion animation, took First Prize.

Hugo Crosthwaite's La Güera, 2018, is featured in the "Readings" section of Harper's Magazine in print in January 2020.

...The selection includes far more photographs and videos than paintings and drawings, although some entries blur those categories. The top prize went to Hugo Crosthwaite for a series of black-and-white drawings, animated into a video, of Berenice Sarmiento Chavez. She is a young Mexican woman who ventured north across the border in search of the American Dream, but has since been deported. The artist encountered her in Tijuana. As winner of the top prize, Crosthwaite will be commissioned to do an official portrait. The 2016 winner, Amy Sherald, made a painting of Michelle Obama that became one of the gallery’s most popular attractions.

The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., named Hugo Crosthwaite the 2019 winner of the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, an astute selection for several reasons. Crosthwaite’s entry, a meditative, three-minute stop-motion animation about a woman migrating from Mexico to the United States, stretched the conventional bounds of portraiture and affirmed the genre’s relevance, both of which are aims of the prize. Over nearly two decades, Crosthwaite has applied portraiture’s concentrated attention not only to individuals but even more avidly to place.

The title of this year’s winning work, by Hugo Crosthwaite, tells us the name of the person represented in the artist’s three-minute stop-motion animation of black-and-white drawings. It is A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chávez, a young woman from Tijuana, Mexico, who is seeking a better life in the United States. Her face emerges from a blank space, like a piece of paper or canvas, and then we watch as her body is sketched in, as though she’s materialized from nothing. In a series of brief vignettes, we learn about the danger that she, like other migrants, has faced, including violence and sexual harassment.

The new exhibition at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles by Mexican-American artist Hugo Crosthwaite (b. 1971) grabs your attention the moment you walk into the gallery. The artist, who lives and works in San Diego and Rosarito, Mexico, created a monumental, 27-foot wide multi-panel work called Death March. Multiple human figures and skeletons compose a funeral march, appearing to honor the deceased in a manner that calls to mind Día de los Muertos, the Mexican holiday Day of the Dead.

For painter and video artist Hugo Crosthwaite, life has unfolded in equal parts on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, and he has come to understand that in a way the border region itself is its own nation, with a unique culture that is both blended and divided, and a population comfortable with dualities. Both his films and graphite and ink drawings on canvas—often at monumental scale—exist in a black-and-white palette and are rich with regal, stylized detail.

The painter is showing a new series of drawings, panel paintings and animations that chart the ebb and flow of humanity, along with unseen magical phenomena, in the U.S.-Mexico-border region where he lives and works. (The artist divides his time between Rosarito and San Diego.) Crosthwaite, a painter whose work is as influenced by comic books as it is by Gustav Doré, recentlywon the top prize in the National Portrait Gallery’s Outwi Boocheyer Portrait Competion, pays tributes to Goya’s Caprichos. A recent series capturing grotesqueries and folly.

The video begins with the sound of a guitar strumming and a voice singing in Spanish. The main character is sketched quickly, beginning with her eyes, then face, hair and shoulders. She gazes into the distance. Over the course of the three-minute stop-motion drawing animation video, we watch as the main character goes about her life, immigrating to the United States and trying to succeed in her new country.

Portraiture is due for a reframing. Although the art form has traditionally served to memorialize the affluent and the powerful, the finalists of the 2019 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition point to a future where portraits empower the disenfranchised. The triennial competition, founded in 2006 by an endowment from the late Virginia Outwin Boochever, calls for artists to “challenge the definition of portraiture.” First-prize winner Hugo Crosthwaite does just that. His 2018 stop-motion animation, A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chávez, illustrates one woman’s journey from Tijuana, Mexico, to the United States.

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery announced that artist Hugo Crosthwaite has been named the first-prize winner of the fifth triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, which aims to reflect the contemporary state of portraiture in the United States. Recognized for his stop-motion drawing animation A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chávez, 2018, Crosthwaite is the first Latinx artist to receive the $25,000 award since the national competition was founded in 2006. Following in the footsteps of Amy Sherald, the previous winner of the prize, the San Diego–based artist will receive a commission to create a portrait of a living individual for the National Gallery’s collection. 

The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, has announced the winner of the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, a triannual contest honoring artists that “challenge the definition of portraiture.” Hugo Crosthwaite, a San Diego-based artist, will take home the $25,000 prize, which also comes with a commission to create a new portrait for the museum’s permanent collection.Crosthwaite follows in the footsteps of now-veritable art star Amy Sherald, who won the last Boochever award in 2016.

Public art is the icing on the cake in the transformation of Liberty Station from a formal, staid Navy training center into a vibrant entertainment, shopping and arts destination. This year, six artists participated in Installations at the Station, the NTC Foundation’s public art program, which will continue next year. This year’s projects included community-painted skateboards representing a wave and a ship on a rooftop, a braided rope bench inspired by the native tribes and the Navy and murals of border scenes by Tijuana artist Hugo Crosthwaite as part of an ongoing narrative in multiple locations that started in 2009.

Danica Phelps draws with uncommon grace. Her line moves with liquid ease, following the momentum of time. It describes what happens in her life, and it also makes things happen. As her beautifually affirming show at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles attests, her line has agency. 

Hugo Crosthwaite's small drawings line the front gallery's walls at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.  A jig saw puzzle of catholic school girls, nudies, saints, tattoos, and ghosts fill the pieces that are excerpts of life in Tijuana.  Many of the scenes are positioned like movie stills, a young girl could be walking off of a surreal set, or she's unwittingly walked into another dimension.  It's cartoonish and seedy, and the spaces where people linger could be the backside of a carnival.  

Though physically immersive, the installation is, paradoxically, less viscerally compelling than the small, discrete works, but still plenty invigorating. Throughout Crosthwaite's work, lust and violence are tempered by grace; tradition embraces surprise.  Acts of witness marry feats of imagination, and a crazy equilibrium makes it all hang together.

 

Throughout the exhibition, Crosthwaite’s work proves haunting or political, cartoonish or literal, showing the depth of his ability and classical training. At times, it feels as if these are bad dreams made real, with surreal moments interspersed amongst more realistic ones. In “Twins,” Crosthwaite explores the inherent censorship and loss of freedom following 9/11 by depicting a man’s fist in the mouth of another in the foreground of the New York skyline.

“Brutal Beauty,” the title of the museum show, captures well the tight conflation of tough and tender in Crosthwaite’s work. An element of violence threads through it, whether in the bruised bodies and flayed skin in Bartolomé (2004), or the guns within reach of the protagonists in A Tail for Two Cities, a large drawing completed on site at the museum, pitting characters representing Tijuana and San Diego in threatening but slightly comical confrontation. As an observer of people and his native city, Crosthwaite seems almost devotional. He doesn’t glamorize or idealize either, but reveres their humble familiarity, their vitality and authenticity. In many of the drawings, Tijuana appears as a cluttered sprawl of rooftops, electrical wires, billboards and other signage, its inhabitants thick-bodied and plain-faced.

Hugo Crosthwaite’s La Cola de dos Ciudades, (A Tale of Two Cities), (2010), and Bartolomé, (2004), are the dominant works of “Brutal Beauty,” his current show at SDMA. La Cola de dos Ciudades, inspired by Crosthwaite’s birthplace Tijuana, highlights conflict between Tijuana and San Diego. Dickens’ famous novel A Tale of Two Cities, Goya’s Duel with Cudgels and Kahlo’s The Two Fridas provided source material. The drawing features two anguished males depicted in a graphic/Pop Art style influenced by Crosthwaite’s recent years in New York and DC comics. Crosthwaite is a superb draftsman, and the fact that he created this work in three weeks in front of an audience is a feat. 

One of the images that stuck to me as I started drawing yesterday, I just did a face, it came into my head an image of Goya's black paintings – there's this painting of these two figures, these two brothers, clubbing each other to death and their sinking. And I thought that could be the image that I'm doing here, two figures having a narrative, there's this duality to them, they're either reconciling or in conflict. 

Hugo Crosthwaite’s three graphite drawings fuse character and cartoon, idiosyncratic identity and flat graphic energy. In one of the intriguing snapshots, a man lightly fingers a frog; in another, a half-naked woman in character-cluttered undershorts glances back at us as she inks a large tattoo.

Crosthwaite's world of violence, poverty, furtive sex and tedium gathers power from the tension between the gritty vision and the beauty and grace of his draftsmanship. His sure line, the subtlety of light and shade and finely rendered details create a sense of reality so vivid you forget that it is in black and white.